


Saving The Galaxy

by Tanaqui



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Gen, SGA Secret Santa 2008
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-16
Updated: 2008-12-16
Packaged: 2017-12-28 02:03:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/986348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tanaqui/pseuds/Tanaqui
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For the technicians in the Atlantis control room, shifts are mostly routine. But sometimes they're not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Saving The Galaxy

**Author's Note:**

> Set in Season One, somewhere between The Eye and The Gift. "Galaxy" is the UK brand name for "Dove" chocolate. Many thanks to SGAfan for helping me thrash out the plot and science, to Scribbler for cheerleading and to Elena Tiriel for her sterling beta-reading skills. Written for planetkiller for sga_santa 2008.

Chuck waited until the wormhole shut down. He wanted to be sure – really sure – that Doctor McKay was gone from Atlantis. Only then did he fish the carefully-saved packet out of his jacket pocket.

Getting up from his chair, he nodded at Peter, sitting at the console behind him. "Be right back. I need a word with Doctor Weir."

Peter's gaze was riveted on the foil-wrapped oblong in Chuck's hand. "You still have _chocolate_? I thought the last rations were handed out weeks ago."

Chuck grinned. "Been stockpiling mine. Thought we might need something to cheer us up later on. Especially Doctor Weir " He tipped his head towards Elizabeth's office. "Don't worry, I'll be back to share. Just thought she deserved the first piece...."

He took a few steps towards the walkway that linked the main control room with the expedition leader's glass-walled sanctum, before swinging round and pointing a warning finger at Peter. "Just don't tell Doctor McKay. Otherwise he'll be breaking into my quarters and ransacking them!"

"Yeah, 'Saving the Galaxy' is Rodney's thing, after all." Peter smirked.

"Huh?" Chuck stared blankly at him.

"You know. Galaxy." Peter paused, but Chuck was still confused and must have looked it. "It's a brand of chocolate." When Chuck raised his eyebrows, Peter shrugged. "Only in the UK, I guess. Never mind. Bad joke." He shook his head and bent back to studying console schematics on his laptop.

Chuck let him be and carried on towards Elizabeth's office, but hadn't gone more than a couple of steps further when he was stopped in his tracks by the whining of the gate powering up.

"What the...?" Peter and Ed, the other technician on duty, lifted their heads to look at him as he scurried back to his chair and checked the display. "Unscheduled offworld acti–."

His words were interrupted by a loud bang from somewhere nearby. The room was immediately plunged into near darkness, lit only by a faint glow coming from the half a dozen laptops sitting on the consoles, and the gate let out another whine – this time an unhappy one – as the dialing sequence cut off and it shut down.

More by touch than sight, Chuck poked at a control in front of him, but the consoles were dead.

"Power failure," Grodin announced from behind him.

"Ya think?" Chuck answered sarcastically. He scooted his chair along to the next console, but the laptop perched on top of it was showing nothing but gobbledygook. "Looks like we lost everything. I'm not getting any inputs from the internal sensors."

"Comms and external sensors are down too," Ed reported. In the shocking near-silence, broken only by the whir of the laptop fans, Chuck could hear the rattle of keys as Ed typed commands, the squeak of Peter's chair behind him as he moved, and the clack of footsteps approaching.

"What's going on?" Chuck looked up and made out the dim form of Elizabeth standing at the exit of the walkway, her hand raised to steady her against one of the supports. She blinked as a sudden beam of light lit her face.

"Sorry!" Peter tilted the flashlight down, and then settled for standing it on end on his console so that it cast a faint glow over the centre of the control room. "We've completely lost power."

"The generators?" Elizabeth stepped forward and transferred her grip to the top of Chuck's console.

"Maybe." Peter sounded uncertain. "We shouldn't have lost them all at the same time, though."

Chuck half turned. "Or the main power conduits blew out?" he suggested. "That bang?"

Peter nodded. "Doctor McKay was tinkering with the power distribution algorithms yesterday to 'make them more efficient'." Peter's tone left no doubt as to what he thought of the astrophysicist meddling with Atlantis's systems.

"And Doctor Zelenka was running some more experiments on the control chair today," Ed pointed out.

"So when the gate dialed in...." Peter rolled his eyes and let out an exasperated sigh.

"Yes, well, we'll work out who to blame later." Elizabeth stopped and cocked her head at the sound of feet clattering up the stairs leading from the lower levels. Two forms emerged from the dark, sweeping the room with the beams from the flashlights on their P-90s.

"Ma'am." Chuck recognised Sergeant Bates' voice. As Bates lifted his P-90 up, he made out Corporal Rickler behind him.

"Sergeant," Elizabeth dipped her head in acknowledgement. "Seems we have a power failure."

"Yes, ma'am." Bates jerked his head back downwards. "Figured as much when comms went out and the door controls wouldn't respond."

"We're trapped in here?" That was Peter. When Bates nodded at him, he slumped back in his seat. "Great!"

"We can force the doors if we have to." Bates turned back to Elizabeth. "Does this mean we've lost external sensors and the gate shield as well, ma'am?"

Elizabeth looked across at Ed, who gloomily confirmed that both were down. Bates grimaced. "Sitting ducks," he muttered to himself.

Elizabeth took a deep breath. "First things first. We need to–." She was interrupted by the familiar whine of the gate powering up again.

"Rickler! With me!" Bates took off across the control room for the main stairs, the corporal a step behind him. Elizabeth headed for the railing to look down at the gate, while Chuck rolled himself back to the central console, although quite what he could do – with no comms or sensors – he didn't know.

The final chevron lit and the wormhole lit the darkened room with shimmering light like sun bouncing off water. Chuck swallowed, waiting for... something, but the blue puddle remained undisturbed. The silence dragged on.

"Radios!" Peter's sudden exclamation made Chuck jump. He looked over his shoulder as Peter scrambled from his seat. "Comms are down, so the headsets are useless," Peter tapped his ear with one hand while he flicked open the clasps on a flight case he'd pulled out of a stack of boxes. "But they may be trying to.... Aha!" He pulled a walkie-talkie from the case and held it up. Deliberately, he pressed the receive button.

"...in Atlantis. This is Sergeant Markham. Do you copy?...." The transmission crackled with static but was surprisingly loud. Chuck let go his grip on the edge of the console and let out the breath he'd been holding.

Elizabeth held out a hand and Peter passed her the radio. "Markham. This is Atlantis." Elizabeth sounded as relieved as Chuck felt.

"Good to hear you, Doctor Weir. We were getting worried."

"We're, ah," Elizabeth paused, frowning down at where Chuck supposed Bates and Rickler must be crouched at the bottom of the main stairs, P-90s trained to lay down crossfire on anyone exiting the wormhole. Elizabeth cleared her throat. "We're having a few technical difficulties here."

Chuck stood up, only half listening to Markham asking if they could help, and saw that Bates was frantically signalling."Get confirmation of ID, ma'am," he called up.

Elizabeth bit her lip for a moment and then nodded and turned her attention back to the walkie-talkie. "Sergeant, do you have Doctor Thiry with you?"

"Yes, ma'am." There was silence for a moment before the radio spluttered again. "This is Dr Thiry." The female voice was heavily accented.

"Docteur...." Elizabeth launched into rapid French. Chuck could only catch a word or two, although he thought there was something about Brussels, Place-something or other and... _cream cakes_? After a couple of minutes, Elizabeth leaned over and waved at Bates. "It's all right," she called down. "It's definitely them."

Bates relaxed, as much as he ever did. "They should stay on the planet and keep the wormhole open," he suggested. "And keep dialing back in when it shuts down. It'll stop anyone else dialing in."

Elizabeth nodded and relayed the order. By the time she was done, Bates had trotted back upstairs, leaving Rickler still covering the open wormhole with his P-90. Elizabeth put the radio down on the console.

"As I was saying," she rubbed the back of her neck, "we need to get power back in the control room. Then we can assess the damage and make radio contact with the rest of the expedition."

"There's a naquadah generator three levels down from here," Peter offered. "If we could get it up here, we could link it directly to the power conduits in the control room. We'll probably need to get through a couple of doors, though...."

Elizabeth nodded. "Take Ed and Rickler." She turned. "Chuck...."

"I'm on it." He was already out of his seat and moving to pry off a wall panel at the back of the control room. Peter was fishing out a couple more walkie-talkies, passing one to Bates and taking the other with him as he and Ed headed towards the back stairs.

"Bates..."

"Make sure the control room is secure. Yes, ma'am."

Out of the corner of his eye, Chuck saw Bates tilt his P-90 in salute before heading back down the main stairs to relieve Rickler and send him to join the others. Soon, the unsettling near-silence had descended once again.

"Bit paranoid, isn't he?" Chuck had now got the panel off. He laid it aside and peered at the mass of circuits and crystals and breaker boxes it had been covering.

"Bates?" Elizabeth let out a strangled laugh. "That's why he's head of security. Besides, not as if we haven't been attacked before when our defenses were down...."

Chuck, reaching for a toolbox stored near the panel, heard the tension in her voice and glanced up to see her still standing by the console, hands tightly clasped in front of her and an absent look on her face. As his fingers sorted through the cables, he thought about all the wild stories that had flown around once they got back from Menaria. About what had really happened during the big storm. Doctor McKay had worn his bandage like a badge of honour; Major Sheppard had instituted a whole new bunch of security protocols; and Doctor Weir had seemed more than ever to bear the weight of the galaxy on her shoulders.

He looked up again and saw Elizabeth was still frozen. He coughed. "Doctor Weir? Would you mind bringing over that laptop," he pointed to the one he needed, "and holding the flashlight for me?"

"Of course." She shook herself and did as he asked, crouching down next to him and shining the beam onto where he was working.

"We'll have this all fixed up in no time," he murmured, as he called up the control room wiring schematics he and Doctor Grodin had mapped some months before, and began tracing and checking wires.

The silence and darkness, just a little circle of light around himself and Doctor Weir, was starting to get just a bit "bloody creepy", as Doctor Beckett had so eloquently put it. So it wasn't surprising they both jumped when the walkie-talkie spluttered into life. "Doctor Weir. This is Grodin. Come in."

Elizabeth stood up and stretched her legs, trying to keep the flashlight on where Chuck was working while she picked up the walkie-talkie with her other hand. "This is Weir. Go ahead."

"The generator's fried." Chuck could hear the frustration in Peter's voice. "Looks like a power spike melted the insides. We can probably fix it... if we have about three weeks...."

The beam of the flashlight droppped for a moment, before Elizabeth must have realised Chuck could no longer see what he was doing, and she flicked it up again. "Where's the next nearest generator?" She sounded tired.

"Ed says out towards the North-east Pier. And Rickler says there must be at least another half dozen doors between here and there we'll have to force."

That was the problem with a city the size of Manhattan when things didn't work, Chuck thought. It would be like getting around Vancouver with the SkyTrain down. Or getting round the galaxy without gates and jumpers. Or....

"Wait." Chuck blinked as Elizabeth turned the flashlight on his face. "I think there's something nearer we can use." He gestured upwards. "Maybe we can fire up one of the jumpers and use _that_ to power the control room?"

A smile lit Elizabeth's face, making her look suddenly much younger. "Peter?" She spoke into the walkie-talkie again. "Chuck's suggested we use one of the jumpers."

There was a moment's silence. Then: "Genius!" Chuck could hear the admiration in Peter's voice. "It'll take a bit of patching, but.... Tell him we'll be right back up."

Chuck leaned back against the wall and dipped his hand into his jacket pocket, fumbling for the chocolate bar. What was it Peter had said? "Saving the Galaxy." Right. And now it was time to celebrate saving it by eating it.


End file.
